Sunday, February 15, 2009By Karen Lee Ziner
The Providence Journal staff writer (Rhode Island, USA)PROVIDENCE –– Molly Soum was 5 years old when the Khmer Rouge forced her and her 3-year-old sister into hard labor with other children, “breaking rocks, with no food or water, and no shade.” Soum lost her father, grandfather and three uncles to the 1975-79 genocide that claimed an estimated 2 million lives and left bodies and bones scattered across Cambodia’s Killing Fields.
As a U.N.-backed tribunal prepares to prosecute the first of five aging Khmer Rouge leaders this week, Soum — like others in Rhode Island’s large Cambodian community — is bitter that only a handful of people will face prosecution for crimes against humanity.
Many see the trials as a waste of millions of dollars, occurring decades too late, and tainted by government corruption. Only a few people interviewed last week said they will follow the proceedings, either through online reports, or satellite television.
Kang Kek Ieu, known as “Comrade Duch,” is scheduled to appear at an initial hearing Tuesday that is expected to review witness lists and determine the extent to which “civil parties” can participate. Duch ran the Toul Sleng interrogation center, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and executed before the Vietnamese invaded the country in December 1978.
The trials of the four others — Khieu Samphan, the group’s former head of state; Ieng Sary, its foreign minister; his wife, Ieng Thirth, former minister for social affairs, and Nuong Chea, the movement’s chief ideologue — are not expected to start before next year. Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge supreme leader, died in 1998 at age 73, before he could be tried for war crimes. At the time, he was held prisoner by former colleagues who had accused him of betraying the revolutionary movement he once led.
“I would like to see them electrocuted,” says Soum of the five who are slated to stand trial. A transition specialist at the Genesis Center and former Cambodian interpreter for the state, Soum said, “I’d like to see them have to watch The Killing Fields film over and over and over — to see what they did,” before they are put to death.
“I believe they should be put on trial, but my heart is too numb to feel the justice.” She added, “Why do we have to wait three decades? Why? There’s no punishment to them. They live, they laugh at us through all these years. I’m very angry.”
A WAVE OF CAMBODIAN REFUGEES arrived in Rhode Island throughout the early 1980s. Those refugees and subsequent generations are estimated at more than 15,000. Resettled by agencies including the International Institute of Rhode Island and Catholic Social Services, they clustered primarily in Providence’s West End, where they established the first Cambodian Buddhist temple in the country.
Many had witnessed the executions of family members and fellow countrymen as the Khmer Rouge worked, tortured and starved people to death as part of a radical experiment in agrarian communism.
The Khmer Rouge referred to this experiment as turning the clock back to “the Year Zero.”
During a four-year reign, from 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge systematically slaughtered urban dwellers, Buddhist monks, people with connections to foreign governments, and teachers, doctors and other intellectuals — even people who wore glasses.
They separated children from parents and brainwashed them, and forced the entire population to work in collective farms or forced labor projects.
The genocide went largely unreported until Dith Pran, then an assistant to New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, emerged four years after he was captured by the Khmer Rouge and told the world about the horrors he’d witnessed. That included the mass graves scattered throughout the country that became known as the Killing Fields.
In Rhode Island, and in other Cambodian resettlement communities around the world, survivors suffered extremely high rates of posttraumatic stress, as they tried to cope with language and cultural barriers in a foreign culture.
Rhode Island’s survivors include Sary Kim, a 60-year-old former seamstress and factory worker now enrolled in job-retraining classes at the Genesis Center in Providence.
Kim still carries images of body parts flung by land mines into the trees, as she and her family ran through the jungle from the Khmer Rouge. She is haunted by a child who was left alone on the jungle path: Kim wanted to carry the girl, whom she estimated at age 2 or 3, but was already carrying her own children. The child appeared traumatized and “could not speak.”
Kim said she was unaware of the pending trials, and will not follow them. Kim said, “I don’t want to know.”
Makna Men, acting director of advisement at Bristol Community College in Fall River and newly appointed chair of the mayor’s Southeast Asian Advisory Council in Providence, came from Khao I Dang refugee camp when he was 13.
He calls the tribunal “a big show,” with only “a very selected few” of Khmer Rouge leaders being tried. Until recently, Men followed news of the pending trial on the Internet. Now he has stopped.
“To me, I lost my father during the Khmer Rouge time and a lot of my first cousins, and my mom lost a lot of her brothers and sisters. The wound is already there in my heart, the torture, the suffering, the starvation — to me this trial really doesn’t do any good,” said Men. “It is not going to close the book.”
One of Men’s enduring memories is the death of his father in 1976.
“The Khmer Rouge didn’t allow me, didn’t allow my brother to go to see his body. They said, ‘If we allow you to go, will you bring him back to life?’ The only one they allowed was my mom. They wouldn’t let us go. He caught malaria or whatever and then the policy of the KR in my village was if you get sick and you cannot work you cannot get food. He died of sickness and starvation at the same time. That memory is going to stay with me ever since. Am I angry with Khmer Rouge? Yes, I am very angry with them.”
Men’s wife, Samoutta Men, is a substance-abuse prevention coordinator at the Socio-Economic Development Center for Southeast Asians, in Providence. She believes the millions spent on the trial could have been used to establish a foundation in memory of Cambodian holocaust victims, and to help educate Cambodia’s young people.
“For me, the healing is never completed,” she said.
Ken Oung, one of several people interviewed at the Cambodian Buddhist temple on Hanover Street, has no confidence in the trials.
“Those key witnesses who are sitting in the government cannot be subpoenaed,” he said. “It’s close to $150 million for less than 10 people. To me, it’s symbolic to tell the international community ‘We are the government; we care.’ But do they really care?”
Oung also believes that the millions spent thus far should have been used for other purposes, such as a psychiatric hospital to help survivors, or education programs “to tell our young generation about the genocide.”
Said Oung, “The trial will not bring justice for me. To spend so much money is ridiculous. It took almost thirty years for the preparation.”
CAMBODIAN DEPUTIES voted in 2001 to create a special tribunal that would bring former Khmer Rouge leaders to trial for war crimes.
The tribunal, formally known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, was set up in 2006 — 13 years after it was first proposed, and nearly 30 years after the Khmer Rouge were toppled by the Vietnamese invasion. The tribunal is administered jointly by the United Nations and the Cambodian government, and is to comprise elements of Cambodian and international law.
According to The New York Times, hundreds of people have applied to the court to be officially recognized as victims of the Khmer Rouge, and to bring parallel civil cases against the five cadre leaders. They may potentially have the right to participate in the investigation, be represented by a lawyer, call witnesses and question the accused at a trial.
Other news reports state that authorities are still deciding how many civil parties will be allowed to participate, and to what extent.
Duch, 65, who is expected to appear at Tuesday’s hearing, has been detained since 1999. He is charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes: those include having committed or abetted murder, torture, rape and persecutions on political grounds.
SAM BECKER, supervisory deputy clerk at District Court, Providence, has long been involved in Cambodian politics, through a political party formed in the United States. He will watch the trial closely.
“First thing in the morning, I go on the Internet” and check for updates on the pending trial, Becker said. He also speaks with his brother and other relatives who are still in Cambodia.
Becker is pleased about the pending prosecutions, “but they’re not doing enough,” Becker said of the tribunal. “The members of the Khmer Rouge being held right now, they are old and their health is not that good. This process is so long. I hope by the time the actual trial is going to go, they won’t be dead.”
Becker criticizes the U.N. for “letting the government dictate the process,” and wrote a letter of protest to then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan two or three years ago.
“I said the U.N. is losing their credibility” by allowing a communist dictator to dictate to the U.N. body — “the international body that’s supposed to be finding justice.” He adds, “The people running the government are former Khmer Rouge, so what are you going to do?”
Becker lost many relatives to the Killing Fields, including his sister and a cousin who was a Buddhist monk.
“My main point is, I hope the government will get this over with before they die off. We want to know why over two million people were killed, and if any other foreign countries were behind it.”
With wire reports
kziner@projo.com
